In order to try and solve our problem eating, we need to understand what the problem is. So, what is emotional eating, binge eating and compulsive overeating?
Emotional or Comfort Eating
Firstly, we need to understand an emotion. What is an emotion? An emotion is caused by a thought that goes through your mind. Here’s an example. Something happens, let’s say we are stuck in traffic on the motorway. We have a thought about that…. ‘I’m going to be late for work and my boss will think I’m unreliable’. This thought or sentence creates an emotional feeling, in the example circumstance it could be anxiety.
When that emotion or feeling is negative, many of us have trained ourselves from childhood to run from those feelings. They feel uncomfortable and we have the belief that we should avoid discomfort whenever possible. How do we do that? If we are emotional eaters, we do that by eating, whether we are hungry or not. So, when something happens and the thought we have creates an uncomfortable feeling, we try and escape that feeling by having something to eat. This makes us feel better, but only temporarily because it doesn’t feel good when we have the extra weight.
Most habits come from childhood and if your parents gave you a sweet treat every time you fell over or felt sad it’s understandable why we use eating to make us feel better now. And it doesn’t have to be massive life stressors, often it is just everyday life; traffic, feeling stressed at work, feeling lonely in the evening.
The solution is to understand how to manage your mind and emotions. First step is being aware. There is no feeling in the world that can physically hurt you (yep even hunger, although it feels like that to me!), and as I continue with this blog, I’ll discuss how you can change those thoughts which in turn change your feelings.
Binge eating
A lot of people initially identify with this way of eating and think that if they overeat on any food they are a binge eater. Actually, a binge is quite different. Binge eating is a bit more extreme than emotional eating.
Binge eaters have a habit of eating large amounts of food in a relatively short amount of time and then feeling regretful and shame. Binge eating isn’t necessarily caused by a negative emotion like emotional eating. With binge eating your brain develops a pattern of responding to many situations in life by eating as much as you can frequently. Once you have done this several times the part of your brain wired for survival will offer this up as a solution over and over again. The urges will come until you feel unable to control yourself.
If you think of your brain being to two parts. The part of the brain causing the urges is your primitive brain and the intellectual, rational part of the brain is the part that makes you get up and walk into the kitchen and prepare the food. Although the primitive brain isn’t actually capable of making you use your muscles to get up, walk to the kitchen and grab the food and eat, it does offer excuses to force the intellectual brain to succumb to the urge. Suggestions such as ‘This will be the last time, and I’ll get stuck into my diet tomorrow’ or ‘I’ve not had too much to eat today and I deserve it’ I’m sure you know the type of excuses or rationale the primitive brain will offer when it wants you to give in to your urge. The primitive brain isn’t trying to sabotage your weight loss efforts, it just thinks you need to do this for survival. It can happen alone, or in company, when you are happy or sad. You may have situations which trigger it, but this type of eating can often expand. We need to understand the urge, what triggers it and how to make it go away.
Emotional or Binge Eater?
Sometimes you aren’t sure whether you are an emotional eater or a binge eater. If you eat a packet of biscuits when you are upset but then stop, you could be an emotional eater. If you eat a packet of biscuits whether you are upset or happy and then move on to other foods even though you’re full, then you are probably a binge eating.
Some may be one or some may be a combination of the two.
Compulsive Overeater
The other type we will discuss is a more generic type, the compulsive overeater. As a compulsive overeater, you may start out as hungry but you continue way past the point of comfortable satisfaction. People who overeat regularly are usually somewhat disconnected from their bodies. They know when they are very hungry or very full but may have a hard time distinguishing the feelings of a little hungry or the beginning of feeling full.
Compulsive overeaters usually eat when other people are eating or when the food looks or smells good. They keep eating if the food tastes good and don’t take into account how much their body truly needs to be satisfied. This type tend to use the clock and not their body to decide when to eat, for example, they will have lunch at 12pm regardless of whether they feel hungry or not. They also pre-emptively eat, so eat before the hunger feeling can come. An example of this is eating before a two hour work meeting when you’re not hungry because you think you may get hungry in the meeting.
Foods we Choose
The other reason why we habitually overeat is the foods we choose. There are foods processed with lots of sugar, fats and salt which are designed by the food industry to create physical cravings so even as we eat them, we want more and more. How many people can just eat one pringle? I know I can’t because once that combination of sugar and fat hits my brain, my brain thinks ‘this is amazing!’ The primitive brain kicks in and views that tub of pringles as survival food that will help you overrun that tiger later!
Food is designed like this so companies can sell more, so if a large part of your diet consists of food like this, it can be difficult to control your intake, even if you are in touch with the signals and urges from your primitive brain telling you that you have had enough.
The solution to each type of eating is getting in touch with your mind and understanding how your primitive brain works. It is also making better choices of what you eat and when. You need to be aware of the foods that give you these unstoppable cravings. When you are aware, you get to decide how much you want and you get to decide whether that struggle is worth it to keep them as a main staple of your diet.
These are the three main overeating types. Did you identify with any? If you did, then that is the first step to being able to understand what you truly need.